The Unexpected Journey

Jonathan and I went with friends Tom and Sarah to see the Hobbit. We saw it not only in theaters, on the opening day, in costume, but in Imax 3-D. We were hard-core, y'all.

We absolutely had the best costumes at our showing; we had the only costumes at our showing. My cloak was completely successful, in my opinion, because it kept me warm in the letting-out-at 2 am frost. I never did come up with a good interim cloak pin, so I used a couple of diaper pins. That's keeping it real, right there.

As for the movie, we liked it. It probably isn't the best of the LOTR movies, but it had a lot going for it. For one thing, the Peter Jackson - Fran Walsh - Philippa Boyens team is so incredibly solid. They can make a movie. They got back a lot of the old cast - Elijah Wood, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Ian Holm, and of course Ian McKellen - and they're so solid together. Howard Shore's music was excellent as always, especially the parts when the dwarves sang. The ending credit song was one of the best I've seen in any movie, ever.

The script was decent, with a few lines that clunked, but it did a fabulous job working with flashbacks and background stories. We got to see the dwarven kingdom that was, and suddenly all the dwarves had character motivation. It also had some gross parts (troll cooking, anyone?), some pretty scary parts, and some silly parts. Apparently they can't resist chase scenes with everyone out in the open and you have to wonder about those revered orcish tracking skills. Ahem. I was impressed, though, that the movie stuck closely to the book AND had an internal plot arc and everything. It kept everyone's attention despite the late hour. It makes me happy to see book scenes. "To think that I should live to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took's son!"

We got to go back to Middle-Earth. That's really the best part. I was just happy to see our old friends and get to spend more time at Bag End and Rivendell. And I would go back again.